Sefa Okutan

This research positions the body as a way of digesting scattered experiences and as a tool for knowledge production. Knowledge emerges through unannounced urban interventions that interrupt daily routines, studio experimentation dealing with gravity and the choreographic translation of political concerns into structured performance.
The work draws on Butler's notion of performativity and Muñoz's concept of disidentification while building on artists who have used falling and failure as choreographic tools, such as Eiko Otake, Amal Kenawy and Tehching Hsieh. This investigation is fundamentally embodied; understanding gravity's subversion or the physicality of anti-falling cannot be fully articulated through text but must be experienced and witnessed through the performing body.

Reactivity, Interference and Collapse
A fall is extraordinary and unusual. It is a sudden release into gravity, contrasting with our usual resistance and muscular contraction to remain upright. My exhaustion with this constant fight against gravity led me to develop an urge to finally love and embrace it, despite the cost of disruption.
In my urban practice across Berlin's public spaces (2024-2025), I used this act of falling to disrupt daily rhythms. These interventions took place in high-traffic areas like U-Bahn stations, busy sidewalks and shopping districts. Each fall lasted until a passerby intervened. Video documentation captured not only the falls themselves but the spectrum of reactions they provoked.
Seeing someone give in to gravity interferes with the spectator's movement through space and urges them to interfere by exercising civil courage to help me up. The gap between falling and being helped ranged from seconds to several minutes, revealing different thresholds of collective responsibility in urban space.
Subverting Vulnerability
While falling is often seen as vulnerable — a loss of control or failure of the body's normative functioning - surrendering to these forces allows us to gain power. We can use the momentum of the fall to rebound, redirecting kinetic energy into dynamic movement.
By reimagining the fall as something powerful, we subvert its connotation. Falling becomes a practice of refusal: refusing the obligation to remain upright, productive and in control. Touching on Ali Chahrour's framing of grief as resistance in 'Night', this work positions the collapsing body as an agent of political refusal rather than passive defeat. What emerges is a choreographic vocabulary born from surrender rather than mastery.

Too much pretending transforms the pretending
Anti-Falling builds on the idea of pretending as a form of reskinning something familiar. My research involved reimagining gravity. I pretend so much it turns it upside down. The act itself rejects the power of gravity.
The current political climate in Germany greatly influenced this research. Increasing state repression, particularly regarding assembly rights - such as prohibitions on the speaking a certain language (in this case Arabic), violent police attacks on protesters and the prosecution of legal protests — made me realize how these forces pull one in all directions.
This overwhelming force led me to embody the notion in a physical act. After learning to feel uplifted by the fall, I went on to subvert the physicality of the fall itself, transforming it into the anti-fall.
The Choreography of Anti-Falling
The anti-fall is defined by a refusal of downward direction. The body moves in multiple directions at once, dispersing gravitational pull. Arms, legs and torso pull in opposing vectors, creating tension without resolution and maintaining a state of suspension rather than collapse. This physicalizes the experience of being torn by conflicting forces like conscience, state power and community calling.
This movement vocabulary produces knowledge about resisting not through opposition but through dispersion, refusing to compile into a single target. It emphasizes the need for decentralized bodies. Resonating with Ahmed's inquiry into how bodies are oriented in space, refusing the gravitational line allows us to inhabit space differently.

Expectation & Refusal
In Anticlimax, pretending plays with the idea of expectation. The performer pretends to build towards a climax, teasing the audience with the promise of resolution. The anticlimax subverts this need and opens up new possibilities for collaborative engagement with the performed act.
Origins in Community & Choreography
This concept stems from my choreographic work in Sumpf by Itchi Fleischer (Swamp), developed in Berlin (2024) with five queer and gender-nonconforming performers. We translated experiences of queer dating, particularly regarding gender nonconformity, into physical movement.
The process involved conversations with members of Berlin's queer community about their dating experiences. From these interviews, each performer developed gestural phrases that we collectively shaped into a structure through improvisational scores. The term "anticlimax" emerged from these community voices, as dating often led to "situationships"—relationships that promise connection but refuse to develop.
The Performed Anticlimax
I investigated whether the spectator needs to experience a climax first to experience a failed climax. I found that suggesting or heavily implying a climax, but then refusing to perform it, creates the anticlimactic moment.
We achieved this by building intensity through repeated, escalating gestures and then stopping or dispersing right when resolution was expected. This durational withholding extends the pre-climactic state until expectation itself transforms. The absence of a climax invites the audience to fill the gaps and imagine, pretending along with the performer to construct their own interpretations.
Knowledge Through Disappointment
This practice reveals that anticlimax is not merely the absence of climax but a site of meaning-making. The queer experiences that inspired this work are not failures to be overcome but spaces to generate. By refusing conventional narrative resolution, anticlimax opens space for alternative forms of connection, intimacy and collective witnessing. Exactly this is what naturally occurs in queer spaces.

Across these components, pretending functions as a methodology that disrupts normative relationships to the body. Falling challenges uprightness, anti-falling challenges gravity and anticlimax challenges dramaturgical expectations. Each practice translates political experience — state repression or queer precarity — into embodied form, producing insights about how bodies might move through restriction.
Unexpectedly, the temporal dimension of waiting became as significant as the movement itself; duration produces meaning. Responses to falling (conducting civil courage, ignoring the fallen person) revealed assumptions about productivity and care that construct our urban spaces, while the anticlimax revealed itself as an abundance rather than a lack.
This research creates agency, implicating witnesses in the meaning-making process, but it also leaves questions open. My position as a white-perceived individual creates a specific public response to my falling body that requires deeper investigation. Questions remain about how anti-falling functions as a collective practice and how these concepts translate beyond the Western European context. These inquiries have already led me toward exploring subversion in Balkan folkloric creatures like the 'Karakoncolos' from Northeast Turkey.

Pretending and subversion are ways of knowing through the body that challenge, disrupt and reimagine what movement can mean and do. This research demonstrates that pretending is a serious methodology for artistic investigation, generating knowledge unavailable through other means.
By falling, anti-falling and refusing climax, I propose that subversion is not about direct opposition but lateral moves: refusing to play by gravity's rules, dispersing rather than concentrating force and withholding resolution to create space for collective (re)imagination.